A Critical Theory of Adult Learning and Education

Jack Mezirow
Source: Adult Education (Adult Education Association of the USA,
Washington, 1981)
32 (1), pp. 3-24.
In the first part of his paper, which is not reproduced here, Jack Mezirow
discusses the application of Jurgen Habermass theory of knowledge to adult
learning and education. Habermas has differentiated three generic areas in
which human interest generates knowledge:
(1)
the area of work, involving instrumental action to control or manipulate
the environment, exemplified by the empirical-analytical sciences (eg
physics,
geology);
(2)
the practical area, involving interaction to clarify the conditions for
communication and intersubjectivity, exemplified by the historicalinterpretive sciences (eg history,
theology, descriptive social sciences);
(3)
the emancipatory area, involving an interest in self knowledge and selfreflection, exemplified by the critical social sciences (eg psychoanalysis, the
critique of ideology).
Each of these three areas has its own techniques of interpretation, assessment
and inquiry, and its own needs.
Mezirow argues that the least familiar of the three areas or domains, the
emancipatory, is of particular interest to adult educators.] [....]

Perspective Transformation
It is curious that the most distinctively adult domain of learning, that involving
emancipatory action, is probably least familiar to adult educators. However,
some readers will recognise the concept of emancipatory action as
synonymous with perspective transformation. This mode of learning was
inductively derived from a national study of women participating in college reentry programs (Mezirow, 1975).
Through extensive interviews, it became apparent that movement through the
existential challenges of adulthood involves a process of negotiating an
irregular succession of transformations in meaning perspective. This term
refers to the structure of psychocultural assumptions within which new
experience is assimilated and transformed by ones past experience. For many
women studied, such psycho cultural assumptions involved the traditional

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stereotypic view of the proper roles of women and the often strong feelings
internalised in defence of these role expectations by women themselves.
Perspective transformation is the emancipatory process of becoming critically
aware of how and why the structure of psycho-cultural assumptions has come
to constrain the way we see ourselves and our relationships, reconstituting this
structure to permit a more inclusive and discriminating integration of
experience and acting upon these new understandings. It is the learning
process by which adults come to recognise their culturally induced dependency
roles and relationships and the reasons for them and take action to overcome
them.
There are certain anomalies or disorienting dilemmas common to normal
development in adulthood which may be best resolved only by becoming
critically conscious of how and why our habits of perception, thought and action
have distorted the way we have defined the problem and ourselves in
relationship to it. The process involves what Freire (1970) calls problem
posing, making problematic our taken-for-granted social roles and
expectations and the habitual ways we act and feel in carrying them out. The
resulting transformation in perspective or personal paradigm is what Freire
refers to as conscientization and Habermas as emancipatory action. In
asserting its claim as a major domain of adult learning, perspective
transformation at the same time asserts its claim as a central function for adult
education.
Our natural tendency to move toward new perspectives which appear to us
more inclusive, discriminating and integrative of experience in attempting to
resolve our disorienting dilemmas may be explained as a quest for meaning by
which to better understand ourselves and to anticipate events. Carl Rogers has
hypnotised ... a formative directional tendency in the universe which can be
traced and observed in stellar space, in crystals, in microorganisms, in organic
life, in human beings. This is an evolutionary tendency toward greater order,
greater interrelatedness, greater complexity (Rogers, 1978). As we will see,
there are both cultural and psychological contingencies which can restrain our
natural movement to learn through perspective transformation.
From our research on re-entry women, the dynamics of perspective
transformation appeared to include the following elements: (1) a disorienting
dilemma;
(2) self examination;
(3) a critical assessment of personally
internalised role assumptions and a sense of alienation from traditional social
expectations; (4) relating ones discontent to similar experiences of other sorts
to public issues - recognising that ones problem is shared and not exclusively a
private matter; (5) exploring options for new ways of acting; (6) building
competence and self-confidence in new roles; (7) planning a course of action;
(8) acquiring knowledge and skills for implementing ones plans;
(9)
provisional efforts to try new roles and to assess feedback; and (10) a
reintegration into society on the basis of conditions dictated by the new
perspective.

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The traumatic severity of the disorienting dilemma is clearly a factor in

establishing the probability of a transformation. Under pressing external
circumstances, such as death of a mate, a divorce or a family breadwinner
becoming incapacitated, a perspective transformation is more likely to occur.
There appear to be two paths to perspective transformation: one is a sudden
insight into the very structure of cultural and psychological assumptions which
has limited or distorted ones understanding of self and ones relationships.
The other is movement in the same direction that occurs by a series of
transactions which permit one to revise specific assumptions about oneself and
others until the very structure of assumptions becomes transformed. This is
perhaps a more common pattern of development.
The role transitions
themselves are only opportunities for the kind of self-reflection essential for a
transformation. In such cases the anomalous situation creating a disorienting
dilemma may be the result of a more evolutionary personal history in which
circumstances make a woman increasingly receptive to changing social norms
regarding womens roles or internalised rigiditys constraining her from
becoming autonomous. There may be more women - and men too - familiar
with Betty Friedans problem without a name than they are with many more
easily labelled existential dilemmas of adulthood.
Paulo Freire has introduced adult educators to conscientization as the process
by which false consciousness becomes transcended in traditional scotties
through adult education. The learning process in conscientization is seen in a
different social context in womens consciousness raising groups and in college
re-entry programs. From our study of this same process in re-entry women, it
became apparent that Freire does not give sufficient cognisance to or make
explicit the stumbling blocks which intervene to make this transformation in
perspective itself highly problematic.
Although one does not return to an old perspective once a transformation
occurs this passage involves a difficult negotiation and compromise, stalling,
backsliding, self-deception and failure are exceedingly common. Habermas has
clearly recognised this fact:
We are never in a position to know with absolute certainty that critical
enlightenment has been effective - that it has liberated us from the
ideological frozen constraints of the past, and initiated genuine self-reflection.
The complexity, strength and deviousness of the forms of resistance; the
inadequacy of mere
intellectual understanding to effect a radical
transformation; the fact that any claim
of enlightened understanding
may itself be a deeper and subtle form of self- deception - these obstacles can
never be completely discounted in our evaluation
of the success of failure
of critique. (Bernstein, 1978, pp. 218-19)
In our study, we encountered women who simply transferred their identification
from one reference group to another with the same absence of critical selfconsciousness which characterised their traditional roles and relationships.
However, our experience does not support the contention of Berger and
Luckmann (1966) that perspective transformations, which they refer to as

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alterations, involve uncritical identification with and emotional dependency

upon a new group of significant others who represent the new and more
attractive perspective, and a degree of identification with and emotional
dependency upon a new group of significant others. While these writers
correctly emphasise the importance of significant others who represent the
new and more attractive perspective, and a degree of identification is probably
inevitable in the process of taking their perspective, the crucial difference
between this process and that of a primary socialisation is that adults are
capable of being consciously critical or critically reflective in effecting these
relationships. Children are critically unselfconscious and usually unaware of
how circumstances have contrived to dictate their relationships and
commitments to parents or mentors charged with their socialisation.
In many cases of perspective transformation new commitments become
mediated by a new critical sense of agency and personal responsibility.
Rather than a simple transfer of identification to a new reference group, a new
set of criteria come to govern ones relationships and to represent conditions
governing commitments as well. Rather than simple identification, the process
may be more accurately described as one of contractual solidarity.
Commitments are made with implicit mutual agreement among equals (in the
sense of agency) concerning conditions of the relationship, including periodic
review and renegotiation with the option of terminating the relationship. Such
insistence upon reciprocity and equality often represents positive movement
toward greater autonomy and self determination. A superior perspective is not
only that is a more inclusive or discriminating experience of integrating but
also one that is sufficiently permeable to allow one access to other
perspectives. This makes possible movement to still more inclusive and
discriminating perspectives. [......]

Critical Reflectivity
Perspective transformation fills an important gap in adult learning theory by
acknowledge the central role played by the function of critical reflectivity.
Awareness of why we attach the meanings we do to reality, especially to our
roles and relationships - meanings often misconstrued out of the uncritically
assimilated half-truths of conventional wisdom and power relationships
assumed as fixed - may be the most significant distinguishing characteristic of
adult learning. It is only in late adolescence and in adulthood that a person can
come to recognise being caught in his/her own history and reliving it. A mind
that watches itself may be Albert Camus definition of an intellectual, but it also
describes an essential function of learning in adulthood. [....] Only in late
adolescence or adulthood does one find theorising about alternative paradigms
of thought as sets of assumptions which significantly influence our selection of
data and our interpretation of evidence.
The concept of critical reflectivity which plays so crucial a role in the adult
learning process and in perspective transformation phenomenological study.

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We can simply become aware of a specific perception, meaning or behaviour of

our own or of habits we have of seeing, thinking or acting. This is an act of
reflectivity. Affective reflectivity refers to our becoming aware of how we feel
about the way we are perceiving, thinking or acting or about our habits of
doing so. Through discriminant reflectivity we assess the efficacy of our
perceptions, thoughts, actions and habits of doing things; identify immediate
causes; recognise reality contexts (a play, game, dream or religious, musical
or drug experience, etc) in which we are functioning and identify our
relationships in the situation. Judgemental reflectivity involves making and
becoming aware of our value judgements about our perceptions, thoughts,
actions and habits in terms of their being liked or disliked, beautiful or ugly,
positive or negative.
Political, economic, sexual, technological and other cultural ideologies which
we have assimilated become manifest in a set of rules, roles and social
expectations which govern the we see, think, feel and act. These ways of
perception, thought and behaviour become habituated. Donald Maudsley
(1979) has adapted the term meta-learning to describe the process by which
learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception,
inquiry, learning and growth that they have internalised. He sees these habits
as important elements in understanding meaning perspectives. Meta-learning
is a common element in almost every kind of learning from learning manual
skills to learning in psychotherapy. Perspective transformation involves not
only becoming critically aware of habits of perception, thought and action but
of the cultural assumptions governing the rules, roles, conventions and social
expectations which dictate the way we see, think, fee and act.
Critical awareness or critical consciousness is becoming aware of our
awareness and critiquing it. Some of the ways this is done may be discerned
by reflecting upon the assertion John is bad. The act of self-reflection which
might lead one to question whether good or bad are adequate concepts for
understanding or judging John may be understood as conceptual reflectivity.
This is obviously different from the psychic reflectivity which leads one to
recognise in oneself the habit of making precipitant judgements about people
on the basis of limited information about them (as well as recognising the
interests and anticipations which influence the way we perceive, think or act).
These two forms of critical consciousness may be differentiated from what may
be called theoretical reflectivity by which one becomes aware that the reason
for this habit of precipitant judgment or for conceptual inadequacy is a set of
taken-for-granted cultural or psychological assumptions which explain personal
experience less satisfactory than another perspective with more functional
criteria for seeing, thinking and acting. Theoretical reflectivity is thus the
process central to perspective transformation.
There is an implicit ordering in the modes of reflectivity previously described,
with most levels of reflectivity incorporating those preceding them. The degree
to which they are age-related is unknown. However, critical consciousness
and particularly theoretical reflectivity represents a uniquely adult capacity
and, as such, becomes realised through perspective transformation.
Perspective transformation becomes a major learning domain and the uniquely

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adult learning function. If adult education is to be understood as an organised

effort to facilitate learning in the adult years, it has no alternative but to
address the distinctive learning needs of adults pertaining to perspective
transformation. [....]

A Critical Theory of Adult Education

We have examined in some detail the nature and development of perspective
transformation as the third-and the uniquely adult-of Habermas three domains
of learning. By clearly differentiating these three interrelated but distinct
knowledge constitutive areas of cognitive interest, Habermas has provided
the foundation for formulating a comprehensive theory of adult education. As
each domain has its own learning goal (namely, learning for task-related
competence, learning for interpersonal understanding and learning for
perspective transformation), learning needs, approaches for facilitating
learning, methods of research and program evaluation are implied or explicit.
This extension of Habermas theory of areas of cognitive interest is reinforced
by the experience of adult educators.
We have understood through
conventional wisdom that educational design and methodology must be a
function of the learning needs of adults and that formula or package programs
which do not fully address the differences in goal and nature of the learning
task are of questionable value. Perhaps it is because we have been marginal to
the mainstream of education for so long that we have been able to sustain our
own rather distinctive perspective on learner centeredness in conceptualising
our role. At any rate, we have tactily recognised the vast differences in helping
adults learn how to do something or to perform a task from helping them
develop sensitivity and understanding in social relationships and from helping
them effect perspective transformation.
As educators, we need not concern ourselves with the philosophical question of
whatever Habermas has succeeded in establishing the epistemological status
of the primary knowledge-constitutive interests with categorically distinct
object domains, types of experience and corresponding forms of inquiry. There
is sufficient force in hypothesis for investigation of and design of appropriate
approaches for facilitating learning relevant to these three domains of learning.
Despite their obvious interrelatedness in everyday life, a compelling argument
has been made for recognising that each involves its own different way of
knowing and each is different enough to require its own appropriate mode of
inquiry and educational strategy and tactics.
Educators have not only failed to recognise the crucial distinction among the
three domains, but have assumed that the mode of inquiry derived from the
empirical - analytical sciences is equally appropriate to all three learning
domains. The behavioural change model of adult education - derived from this
approach and therefore appropriate to facilitating learning concerned with
controlling and manipulating the environment - has been undiscriminatingly
applied as appropriate to the other domains as well. This misconception has

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become so pervasive that the very definition of education itself is almost

universally understood in terms of an organised effort to facilitate behavioural
change. Behaviourism has become a strongly institutionalised ideology in both
psychology and education. Habermas analysis of primary cognitive interests
helps us demythify the learning.
If you were to ask most professionals in adult education to outline how they
would conceptualise program development, the model would probably be one
which sets educational objectives in terms of specific behaviours to be acquired
as dictated by a task to be accomplished. The task or role to be played is
analysed to establish its requisite skills, behaviours or competencies. This is
often referred to as a task analysis. The difference would constitute a needs
assessment.
An educational program is composed of a sequence of
educational exercises reduced to their component elements with immediate
feedback on each learning effort. Education is evaluated by subtracting
measured learning gains in skills or competencies from behavioural objectives.
There is nothing wrong with this rather mechanistic approach to education as
long as it is confined to task oriented learning common to the technical
domain of learning to control and manipulate the environment. It is here such
familiar concepts as education for behaviour change, behavioural objectives,
needs assessment, competency based education, task analysis, skill training,
accountability and criteria-referenced evaluation based upon the empiricalanalytic model of inquiry have relevance and power.
It is only when educators address the other two domains of learning, social
interaction - including educational process - and perspective transformation,
using the same model that they have been wrong and generally ineffectual.
The most common form this has taken is to attempt to broaden behavioural
skills necessary to perform the task for which education is required. The
assumption is that these are learned much like any other behavioural skill
except that practice occasionally requires the use of hypothetical reality
contexts, such as role playing, which are unnecessary in learning to operate a
lathe or to perform other manual tasks.
Inherently different modes of systematic inquiry and educational design are
implicit in the processes involved in the other two primary domains of learning.
The second, social interaction, calls for an educational approach which focuses
on helping learners interpret the ways they and others with whom they are
involved construct meanings, ways they typify and label others and what they
do and say as we interact with them. Our task is to help learners enhance their
understanding of and sensitivity to the way others anticipate, perceive, think
and feel while involved with the learner to take the tole of others, to develop
empathy and to develop confidence and competence in such aspects of human
relations as resolving conflict, participating in discussion and dialogue,
participating and leading in learning groups, listening, expressing oneself,
asking questions, philosophising, differentiating in order to motives from
because motives and theorising about symbolic interaction.
Studies of
analysis and phenomenological analyses seem especially appropriate for both
educational research - especially that relating to educational process - and

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evaluation. Our work through the Centre for Adult Education would be included
in these efforts (Mezirow, 1975; Mezirow and Rose, 1978; Mezirow et al.,
1975).
Perspective transformation, the process central to the third learning domain,
involves other educational approaches. Here the emphasis is on helping the
learner identify real problems involving reified power relationships rooted in
institutionalised ideologies which one has internalised in ones psychological
history. Learners must consequently be led to an understanding of the reasons
imbedded in these internalised cultural myths and concomitant feelings which
account for their felt needs and wants as well as the way they see themselves
and their relations. Having gained this understanding, learners must be given
access to alternative meaning perspectives for interpreting this reality so that
critique of these psycho-cultural assumptions is possible.
Freire has demonstrated how adult educators can precipitate as well as
facilitate and reinforce perspective transformation.
Beginning with the
problems and perspectives of the learner, the educator develops a series of
projective instructional materials - contrasting pictures, comic strips or stories
posing hypothetical dilemmas with contradicting rules and assumptions rooted
in areas of crucial concern to learners. Socratic dialogue is used in small group
settings involving learners who are facing a common dilemma to elicit and
challenge psycho-cultural assumptions behind habituated ways of perceiving,
thinking, feeling and behaving. Emphasis is given equality and reciprocity in
building a support group through which learners can share experiences with a
common problem and come to share a new perspective. An ethos of support,
encouragement, non-judgmental acceptance, mutual help and individual
responsibility is created. Alternative perspective are presented with different
value systems and ways of seeing.
Where adults come together in response to the same existential dilemma for
the purpose of finding direction and meaning, projective instructional materials
may be unnecessary. In a support group situation in which conditions for
Habermas ideal speech are approximated, all alternative perspectives
relevant to the situation are presented. Critical reflectivity is fostered with a
premium place on personalising what is learned by applying insights to ones
own life and works as opposed to mere intellectualisation. Conceptual learning
needs to be integrated with emotional and aesthetic experience.
The research technique used by ethonomethodolgists called breaching for
studying meaning perspectives might also be used as an effective instructional
method to foster perspective transformation. This would involve educational
experiences which challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about
relationships in order to call them into critical consciousness. For example,
learners used to traditional teacher student relationships can be helped to
examine implicit assumptions by being placed in a learning situation in which
the educator refuses to play the traditional authority role of information giver
or activities director but rather limits his or her response to that of a resource
person. This typically generates strong negative feelings in learners who are
unable to cope with the unexpected lack of structure, individuals can be helped

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to recognise the way psycho-cultural assumptions about authority relationships

have generated their habits of perception, thought and behaviour and be
assisted to plan and take action.
While Habermas is correct in suggesting that psychoanalysis and critique of
ideology are appropriate methods for inquiry in this domain of learning, they
are also appropriate educational methods.
The process of perspective
transformation may also be studied using interviews; comparing movement in
problem awareness, expectations and goals; or through comparative analysis
to inductively ascertain commonalities.
Perspective transformation, following the cycle delineated earlier, also involves
learning needs attendant upon systematically examining options, building
confidence through competence in new roles, acquiring knowledge and skills to
implement ones plans and provisionally trying out new roles and relationships.
These learning needs involve all three learning domains. In everyday life few
situations (eg, self-instruction in a manual skill) will involve only one learning
domain. They are intricately intertwined. To be able to facilitate learning adult
educators must master the professional demands of all three and become
adept at working with learners in ways that will be sensitive to both the
interrelatedness and inherent differences among them.
I see no serious ethical issues involved in education for perspective
transformation. Helping adults construe experience in a way which they may
more clearly understand the reasons for their problems and understand the
options to them so that they may assume responsibility for decision making is
the essence of education. Bringing psycho-cultural assumptions into critical
consciousness to help a person understand how he or she has come into
possession of conceptual categories, rules, tactics and criteria for judging
implicit habits of perception, thought and behaviour involves perhaps the most
significant kind of learning. It increases a crucial sense of agency over
ourselves and our lives. To help a learner become acquainted with them, to
become open to them and to make use of them to more clearly understand
does not prescribe the correct action to be taken. The meaning perspective
does not tell the learner what to do; it presents a set of rules, tactics and
criteria for judging. The decision to assume a new meaning perspective clearly
implies action, so the behaviour that results will depend upon situational factor,
the knowledge and skills for taking effective action and personality variables
discussed earlier.
Education becomes indoctrination only when the educator tries to influence a
specific action as an extension of his will, or perhaps when he blindly helps a
learner blindly follow the dictates of an unexamined set of cultural assumptions
about who he is and the nature of his relationships. To show someone a new
set of rules, tactics and criteria for judging which clarify the situation in which
he or she must act is significantly different from trying to engineer learner
consent to take the actions favoured by the educator within the new
perspective. This does not suggest that the educator is value free. His
selection of alternative meaning perspectives will reflect his own cultural
values, including his professional ideology - for adult educators one which

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commits us to the concept of learner self-directedness as both the means and

the end of education.
Inasmuch as the overwhelming proportion of adult learning is self-directed
(Tough, 1978) and uses the experience of others as resources in problem
solving, those relatively few occasions when an adult requires the help of an
adult educator must be understood in their broader context. Clearly, we must
attempt to provide the specialised educational resource adult learners seek
when they choose to use an adult educator, but our professional perspective
needs to be unequivocal: we must respond to the learners educational need in
a way which will improve the quality of his or her self-directedness as a learner.
To do less is to perpetuate a dysfunctional dependency relationship between
learner and educator, a reification of an institutionalised ideology rooted in the
socialisation process.
Although the diversity of experience labelled adult education includes any
organised and sustained effort to facilitate learning and, as such, tends to
mean many things to many people, a set of standards derived from the generic
characteristics of adult development has emerged from research and
professional practice in our collective definition of the function of an adult
educator. It is almost universally recognised, at least in theory, that central to
the adult educators function is a goal and method of self-directed learning.
Enhancing the learners ability for self direction in learning as a foundation for a
distinctive philosophy of adult education has breadth and power. It represents
the mode of learning characteristic of adulthood.
Each of three distinct but interrelated domains - controlling and manipulating
the environment, social interaction and perspective transformation - involves
different ways of knowing and hence different learning needs, different
educational strategies and methods and different techniques of research and
evaluation. A self-directed learner must be understood as one who is aware of
the constraints on his efforts to learn, including the psycho-cultural
assumptions involving reified power relationships embedded in institutionalised
ideologies which influence ones habits of perception, thought and behaviour as
one attempts to learn. A self-directed learner has access to alternative
perspectives for understanding his or her life, has acquired sensitivity and
competence in social interaction and has the skills and competencies required
to master the productive tasks associated with controlling and manipulating
the environment.

A Charter for Andragogy

Andragogy, as a professional of adult educators, must be defined as an
organised and sustained effort to assist adults to learn in a way that enhances
their capability to function as self-directed learners. To do this it must:
(1)

progressively decrease the learners dependency on the educator;

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(2)
help the learner understand how to use learning resources - especially
the experience of others, including the educator, and how to engage others
in
reciprocal learning relationships;
(3)
assist the learner to define his/her learning needs - both in terms of
immediate awareness and of understanding the cultural and psychological
assumptions
influencing his/her perception of needs;
(4)
assist learners to assume increasing responsibility for defining their
learning
objectives, planning their own learning program and evaluating
their progress;
(5)
organise what is to be learned in relationship to his/her current personal
problems, concerns and levels of understanding;
(6)
foster learner decision making - select learner-relevant learning
experiences which
require choosing, expand the learners range of
options, facilitate taking the perspectives of others who have alternative
ways of understanding;
(7)
encourage the use of criteria for judging which are increasingly inclusive
and differentiating in awareness, self-reflexive and integrative of experience;
(8)
foster a self-corrective reflexive approach to learning - to typifying and
labelling, to
perspective taking and choosing, and the habits of learning
and learning
relationships;
(9)
facilitate problem posing and problem solving, including problems
associated with the implementation of individual and collective action;
recognition of relationships between personal problems and public issues;
(10) reinforce the self-concept of the learner as a learner and doer by
providing for
progressive mastery; a supportive climate with feedback to
encourage provisional efforts to change and to take risks; evoidance of
competitive judgment of
performance; appropriate use of mutual support
groups;
(11) emphasise experiential, participative and projective instructional
methods; appropriate use of modelling and learning contracts;
(12) make the moral distinction between helping the learner understand
his/her full range of choices and how to improve the quality of choosing vs
encouraging the learner to make a specific choice.
I believe the recognition of the function of perspective transformation within
the context of learning domains, as suggested by Habermas theory,
contributes to a clearer understanding of the learning needs of adults and
hence the function of education. When combined with the concept of selfdirectedness as the goal and the means of adult education, the essential
elements of a comprehensive theory of adult learning and education have been
identified. The formulation of such a theory for guiding professional practice is
perhaps our single greatest challenge in this period of unprecedented
expansion of adult education programs and activities. It is a task to command
our best collective effort.

Notes

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1. See Trent Schoroyers The Critique of Domination: the Origins and Development
of Critical Theory (Beacon Press, Boston, 1973) and Thomas McCarthys The Critical
Theory of Jurgen Habermas (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1979), the most complete
synthesis of Habermas work in English.
2. See Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness; An Essay on Reification (Harper
Torchbrooks, New York, 1975).
3. For a review of related research see A. Jon Magoon, Constructivist Approaches
in Educational Research, Review of Educational Research, 47 (1977), 651-93.
4. Conventional T group experience fosters psychic rather than theoretical
reflexivity.

References
Berger, Peter L and Thomas Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality,
Doubleday, Garden City, New York
Bernstein, Richard J. (1978) The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, University
of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia
Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herter and Herter, New York
Maudsley, Donald B. (1979) A Theory of Meta-Learning and Principles of Facilitation:
An Organismic Perspective, Doctoral dissertion, University of Toronto, Toronto
Mezirow, Jack (1975) Education for Perspective Transformation: Womens Re-entry
Programs in Community Colleges, Centre for Adult Education, Teachers College,
Columbia University, New York
(1975) Evaluating Statewide Programs of Adult Basic Education: A Design with
Instrumentation, Centre for Adult Education, Teachers College, Columbia University,
New York
Mezirow, Jack and Amy Rose (1978) An Evaluation Guide for College Womens Re-entry
Programs, Center for Adult Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New
York
Mezirow, Jack, Gordon Darkenwald and Alan Knox (1975) Last Gamble on Education:
Dynamics of Adult Basic Education, Adult Education Association of USA, Washington,
DC
Rogers, Carl (1978) The Formative Tendancy, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18,
23-6 Tough, Allen (1978) Major Learning Efforts:
Recent Research and Future
Directions, The Adult Learner, Current Issues in Higher Education, National Conference
Series, American Association for Higher Education, Washington DC

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